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Archive for May 2015

Securing the enterprise is getting harder and harder. Infrastructure is rapidly becoming virtual, applications and workloads are moving to the cloud, endpoints are largely the property of the worker, and mobility has now become the norm. Add in the fact that businesses are rapidly becoming digital organizations where the reliance of IT is at an all-time high, and it’s easy to see why a security breach today is exponentially more damaging than just a few years ago.

Unless it meets these criteria, it’s not an edge data
center – it’s just a data center in a tier-2 market.

The explosion of the cloud and internet-based content has created the need to move the internet’s “edge,” closer to where the users are. Historically, the “edge” had been limited to tier-1 cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. If a user in a tier-2 city, such as St. Paul, wanted to access internet-based content, the data would actually come from the closest edge location, in this case Chicago.

The outgoing CEO had some fun touting Cisco’s impressive
numbers on his last quarterly call with Wall Street.

May 13, 2015 marks the beginning of end of the John Chambers era at Cisco. This week, the company held its quarterly earnings call with Wall Street, and Chambers was in an uncharacteristically combative and celebratory mood. If this had been an NFL football game, I would have expected to see Chambers grab the football, run to the center of Texas Stadium, and spike it in the center of the big star, a la Terrell Owens. Maybe post retirement we will see him run in the VMware parking lot and spike a Nexus switch?

Interactive whiteboards, or smart boards, are certainly nothing new. In fact, I first used one in the early ’90s, when working at a college in Victoria, B.C. It was hard to use and quality was low — a situation that, unfortunately, lasted the better part of two decades and created a negative bias against the technology. But, as I wrote for No Jitter a year ago, smart boards are finally worth a serious look as part of an enterprise UC plan.

You might start with the SMART kapp IQ, introduced earlier today by SMART Technologies. With kapp IQ, SMART adds to its already highly successful digital whiteboard family. SMART took smart board technology a huge step forward with the original kapp, tethering the content on the board to mobile devices running the Android and iOS operating systems.

For all the success that Cisco has had in the collaboration market, the company has struggled in attracting developers to build UC-based applications. Cisco has talked the talk of being a “platform” vendor, but hasn’t been able to walk that walk yet. While the revamped DevNet program is much better than previous initiatives, Cisco is still in the early stages of building the community. This is particularly so in the collaboration space, which should be the low-hanging fruit for DevNet.

This video-centric startup continues pushing
the envelope on team collaboration.

Startup Biba yesterday announced Version 3.0 of its collaboration tool, including H.323/SIP connectivity for room video conference systems and a host of other features.

If you’re not familiar with Biba, you can think of it in comparison to next-generation collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark and Unify Circuit. Like those tools, Biba is aimed at changing the way people — particularly those who are highly mobile — work.

Since its inception five and a half years ago, VCE has done only one thing and done it better than any other company – simplify the deployment of converged infrastructure. The company’s flagship product, Vblock, brings together VMware, Cisco, and EMC infrastructure in a preconfigured, validated design, allowing customers to stand up a private cloud in under a week. Deploying a private cloud at that speed is impossible if all of the infrastructure has to be tied together manually.

Vblock and recently released VxBlock products are really targeted at large enterprises and tier 1 service providers for supporting mission-critical workloads. What’s missing from the VCE portfolio is a platform to support applications like next-generation databases, cloud-native, and tier-2 applications that require rapid deployment and significant scale-out capabilities.

This week at EMC World in Las Vegas, VCE announced the release of a new product, VxRack, aimed at meeting the needs of that market. VxRacks are rackscale, hyper-converged systems that enable service providers and enterprises to manage the initial deployment and subsequent scale out of cloud-native, mobile, and other applications.